The FAST Success Formula | Eben Pagan’s 10 Habits for Aspiring Entrepreneurs

He's an American entrepreneur, author, and speaker. He's widely respected as one of the world's most well-known and respected internet marketers. He teaches through a mix of video training, webinars, written guides, one-on-one training, and seminars. He's Eben Pagan, and here are his top 10 rules for success.

He says rich is a state of mind, and that if you're rich on the inside, you can then go create money. But if you're not rich on the inside, if you don't have a rich state of mind, not only will you not be able to attract and create money, but if you do get some, you'll find a way to get rid of it, right? A way that I have of saying it is that there's a big difference between money and wealth. And wealth comes from having knowledge, systems, assets, understanding of how to create value for others and having systems and assets that create value, whereas money is just these, you know, imaginary numbers and these worthless pieces of paper that we, you know, try to pretend to have value. So success is about fulfillment, and I think fulfillment is about creating success for yourself but then creating success for others and helping them succeed.

Have you ever seen Stephen Covey talking about how you have to put the big rocks in your day or else they won't go in? So what he'll do is he takes a big fish tank and on the table he has some big rocks and then he has some smaller rocks and then he has some pebbles and then he has some sand. So what he does is first he starts by putting all the sand into the tank and then he puts in the little pebbles and then he puts in the bigger rocks. By the time he's done, the tank is almost full and he can't fit in the big rocks that he has. They just kind of sit on top and there's nowhere to put most of them. But then what he does is he takes the big rocks and he puts them into the tank first. Then he takes the smaller rocks and he puts them in and he fits them around the bigger rocks. Then he takes the little pebbles and he puts them in and they fit in around the smaller rocks and the bigger ones. Then he pours a ton of sand in there, which fills all the cracks up. And the lesson is that you have to put in the big rocks first or else they'll never go in. Okay, and the interesting thing about the big rocks is that they have to be chosen in advance. In other words, you must identify what your most valuable activities are and then install them in your day ahead of time. Because if you don't, okay, other people will have things for you to do. Other people will take your attention. And I can almost guarantee you that these other things that other people have for you are less important, but in the moment they seem a lot more urgent. Okay, so you gotta put the big rocks in first, and very importantly, you have to know what they are.

Don't keep your best ideas secret. Most of the business owners that I know, whenever they figure out something that's really fantastic, a thing that would really help prospects out, they start scheming about how to sell it for a lot of money and about how to get people to give them money before they reveal this secret to them, or this product, or this service, or this, this information. Well, guess what? If you don't show people what you've got and you don't prove to them that you have a lot of value, they're not going to pay any attention to you at all. A different mindset that I've developed and learned over the last several years is that if you will take your best ideas, the ones that are the most valuable, the ones that you might consider to be the silver bullets, the magic bullets, the ones that work every time, that give instant results, that eliminate hassle and friction from a person's life, and you give those away, the prospect will say to themself, "Well, geez, if this is what they're giving away, how much better must be the product that they're selling?" So the advice that I have for you is ask yourself right now, what is the one thing that you've figured out over your lifetime and over your career that can help your prospects out the most? The thing that can give them the most value, eliminate the most friction and hassle from their life, right? The thing that works every single time. What's the magic bullet that you figured out? The one that before you heard this, you would never share with anyone. Okay, good. What I'd like you to do now is make a commitment to yourself to give it away. And give it away to as many people as you possibly can. By the way, this is the kind of thing that will create viral marketing for you. This is the kind of thing that you give it away, people will start talking about it. They'll start coming to you and saying, "Wow, that's an incredible idea. Do you have any more?" And I advise you to give away even more of your good ideas. Now, language is part of communication, but there's a much bigger piece of communication than language, which is the nonverbal communication that happens between people. Most persuasion, most bonding, most connection happens on channels other than the words. So you've heard the old estimates that over 90% of your communication is your voice tone and your body language. Communication is so important. And what's amazing is most people are just unconscious. They're not paying any attention to it. They're not learning how to communicate with and connect with other people better. Learn about body language, learn about nonverbal communication, learn about how to connect with people and build rapport.

So I think of entrepreneurship as being like an ultimate training ground, an ultimate practice place to learn the basic skills that we need to learn in order to then come back and, and be great at contribution. Stephen Covey has the model of first we start out dependent And then we become independent, and then we become interdependent. And in developmental models, uh, if you study developmental psychology, which I recommend you do, in any of the developmental models, each level acts as a foundation for the next level. So if we don't become powerfully independent, we can't become powerfully interdependent. And I think of entrepreneurship as being the best school now for becoming powerfully independent. Robert Kiyosaki, who wrote Rich Dad Poor Dad and Cashflow Quadrant, some other books that are excellent initial training, you know, he's got this, this model where he says we start out as employee, and then we go to self-employed, and then we become business owners, and then we become investors. And then I would add, then we become philanthropists, ideally. We become people that come back and contribute. And these build upon each other. So when you're an employee, you learn some tasks, some skills. You do them. You get a paycheck. When you become self-employed, now you're responsible. You have to go get the business as well. Then when you're a business owner, you create that organism or that entity that then runs and throws off the profit. And then when you become an investor, you invest in those types of entities. And then ideally, when you become a philanthropist or someone that's contributing, you start investing in the most important, biggest, widest-scale kind of projects. And I say that model, those 5 steps, because entrepreneur, business owner is in the middle. And what I want to emphasize is that entrepreneurship and owning and building a business, it's one step in a much bigger puzzle. It's not the end. Unfortunately, I see a lot of entrepreneurs get stuck at that step. They get to that level and they start becoming very successful, and then they just want more and bigger and, you know, more money and more power, rather than realizing, oh, that's just one step that I need to become competent in so that I can go on to the next level and go on to the next level. So what's the difference between these levels? Well, essentially the difference is each one becomes more complex and more multi-dimensional and has a longer time horizon.

Right?

So when you're an employee, you're just doing your work to get your paycheck in 2 weeks. When you're self-employed, all of a sudden the time horizon moves out and you learn about invoicing and you learn that companies don't pay invoices as fast as you used to get your paycheck. And then when you become a business owner, an entrepreneur, kind of proper, you start thinking in timeframes of months and years in terms of return. You become an investor, you start thinking in terms of multiple years or even decades. And then philanthropist, you look way out onto the horizon. And I say this because each level builds on the previous levels. This entrepreneur level where you start learning to manage a team, to manage resources, to think in multi-year time horizons, it's a really important step for us to all go through. And when I hear people tell me that they want to make an impact on the world, and they go straight from high school to that, or sometimes straight from college to that, and they don't get a little experience working in the entrepreneurial world, my heart sinks a little bit because I think they're not going to be as powerful at making a difference or an impact in the world as they would have been had they gone and made themselves strong and powerful and successful First, start habitualizing or ritualizing or systemizing or routinizing those things that are the most important things and start doing them every day at the same time.

And what you'll find is that especially in the work arena, okay, in business, if you will make rituals and routines out of the very high-value things in your life, every day you'll do them at the same time automatically. Because if you think about it, you already do the same things every day at the same time automatically. When we procrastinate, what we're usually doing is resisting doing something different than we normally do. Right? We have our routines that we're in. We're all creatures of habit. We like to do the same things at around the same times every day. And when we're procrastinating, what we're doing is going, "Oh, I don't really want to do that thing right now." Sometimes we don't know why. We're coming up with a bunch of excuses. It's usually just because it's not a habit. It's not a routine. It's not something that we do automatically every day. As an example, I struggled for years with trying to get my sleep and my exercise and my diet all in shape. Well, that all changed when I built a simple routine where I go to sleep at the same time, I wake up around the same time, and then I do my exercise first thing, and then I eat a healthy meal first thing. And then I just made a routine out of that. So I go to sleep, I get enough sleep, I wake up, first thing that I do is I make sure that I get my exercise, and then I have a healthy meal. And now I'm pulled into these routines every day, and I don't have to worry about procrastinating because it's a ritual. It's something that I do the same every day. Now, it takes 30 days or so to actually create a new habit, so you gotta force yourself to do it at the same time every day. At 2 to 3 weeks, you'll notice it gets easier and easier. And then at about a month, you're just doing the exact same thing every day. You're pulled into it. You find yourself doing it automatically.

And this is the one where everyone goes, "I don't want to be a salesperson," right? One of the things that we do in our business is we take experts and we teach them how to package their information up into products like ebooks and other information products and sell them. Well, when I start talking to these experts, Almost universally they say things like, "I've got all the content. I just need to find someone who can market and sell it for me." When I say to them, "Well, you know what would probably be good for you is to actually learn some marketing and sales," they go, "Oh, I don't want to learn. I'm not a salesman." They kind of look down at salespeople like it's some lower form of human business scum or something like that. You know, you imagine, okay, I have to put on a funky, like a weird suit and like a windbreaker, like a car salesman in order to sell my product. I would never want to do that. Well, when you really learn sales, as I know you know because you're a fantastic salesperson, that the best selling methods are consultative selling where you don't sit down and try to talk someone into buying. You sit down and you say, let me ask you some questions. Let me learn about you and find out what all your problems are. And let me see if what I have is even a fit. And then once you've found out where they're at, what their problems are, what all the challenges they're facing are, and what they'd like to accomplish, then you sell solutions. You sell them fixing their problems. You sell them getting what they want, not your thing. And the best of the best of the best salespeople are the ones that walk in and sit down and ask a bunch of questions and then say, my product can't help you. Let me refer you to someone who can. 'Cause those are the people that win the trust and that when they say, "This is the thing that will solve your problem," the prospect says, "That's the thing I need," 'cause they're trustworthy. So learning consultative selling and really learning how to sell like a professional is very important.

Know thyself. Know thyself. This is probably the most famous phrase handed down from the Greek philosophers. Know thyself. Why is it so important? Why is it so profound? And another question: why do we do what we do? Why do we think the way we think? Why do we feel the way we feel? Why do we behave in certain patterns and get into certain relationship patterns in our lives? Well, these are the magic questions. Psychology answers these questions on the general level, but we all have experiences that are private, very individual and very powerful. We have something that's shaping our thoughts, shaping our emotions, shaping our behavior from the inside. Why is it so important to know yourself?

What does it mean?

Well, I don't think it means to know what your favorite TV show is or what your favorite restaurant is. I do think to know yourself means to understand your personality, to understand how you're wired, what you're likely to do in different situations under different types of pressure and with different types of people. The reason that it's so important to know thyself is because there are many different types of people in the world, and to create success, you must work effectively with yourself and with others. You must know yourself. You must know how you work so you can control yourself, communicate well, and understand what others are communicating, and ultimately increase your effectiveness communicating and persuading others and creating the results that you want in your life. It's also critical to know yourself so you can understand your weaknesses, your soft spots, your Achilles heels, and those things in your life that can hurt you. All of these things are intimately connected to your personality. Understanding your personality is understanding yourself. If you'd like to know thyself, then know thy personality.

In the past, the paradigm that we use as business owners and marketers is that we have some entry-level stuff that we use to get prospects' attention. And those things might be like advertisements, or we might offer, you know, some free information or free report, or sometimes even free recorded messages or free consultations. And then we move and we have the kind of mid-level priced products that we sell and upsell to. And then we have our highest-end products that we sell to our best customers. Well, what's happening now, and what's happening a lot and accelerating over the last few years with the rise of the internet, is more and more stuff is available for free. There are more companies that are funded by venture capital that have $50 million in cash in the bank that they don't know what to do with, so they're just giving stuff away to customers. Things are becoming cheaper and cheaper to produce, and all that stuff that you used to think of as being your, your real valuable stuff, now you've got your competitors giving it away to your customers. So if you can't beat them, you need to join them. And in fact, what I think you need to do is get in front of them. And what we do is we take that line that was the stuff that we used to give away for free and we move it deeper into the customer relationship. And the things that we used to charge money for, our entry-level products, now we give away. And what that does is it builds relationships with more customers. It allows us to kind of widen our funnel, so to speak, and attract a lot more prospects. So let me give you an example from one of our current businesses. As I mentioned before, we have a company called Double Your Dating, and in that company we teach dating advice to men. Now, we actually have another company that we teach dating advice to women, and we have others that we teach other kind of self-help and personal development topics.

But the one that started it all was the company called Double Your Dating.

And when I originally sat down to work on the marketing for that that company, I started playing around with email newsletters. And at first the newsletters that I sent out were very short and they were excerpts of some of our products and other stuff that wasn't really all that valuable, but it was free and I thought that people would, you know, kind of find it, find some value in it. We started sending them out. Well, as we developed, I started writing longer and longer newsletters and I realized that the more valuable the newsletter the more it caused people to want to invest in our products. And at one point I said to myself, "You know what? I want to create the most valuable newsletter that has ever been created on any topic, ever, in history, and then I want to give it away." I set the bar very high.

And when I was thinking this, I was thinking about financial newsletters that sometimes cost thousands of dollars a year.

I mean, I was really putting the bar up there. And if you've ever read some of our newsletters, you'll see that they average probably 15 or 20 pages long and we send them out every couple of days. Some of them are as long as 30 or 40 pages of value, jam-packed with entertaining, useful, step-by-step mindsets, everything that you could possibly need. And we get letters from all around the world constantly talking about how, of appreciation, thanking us for the value that we jam-pack into these newsletters. If you subscribe to that newsletter and you're interested in getting dating advice, you will have your pitcher filled up to the brim. Now I recommend that you ask yourself, how can you move the free line in your business? You might not want to go overboard like we did, but what's an entry-level product that doesn't cost you much to produce that you can just give away to your customers? If you don't use information products in your business, things like email newsletters and downloadable ebooks and CD and DVD courses and streaming video like you're watching right now, then you really need to do that and you need to learn about it as soon as you possibly can. The idea of bringing light to failures, right? And you mentioned that in our business we try to encourage people, as soon as you see something that goes wrong or you screw something up, raise your hand and say, "Hey, I screwed up," or, "I see something that's wrong over here," and make it a win. And I just want to slip this in there. The reason why that's so important is that We humans don't like to look bad in front of others. We don't like to look like idiots. We don't like to screw things up. So what we do in a business or corporate environment is we screw something up and then we take it and we hide it and we isolate. We try to not let anyone see it. We try to go to work fixing it. Unfortunately, if you screwed something up, it probably means that you didn't know how to do it right the first time, and it probably also means further that if If you take it and isolate and try to fix it, you're probably going to even make it worse. If you let people have that mentality of you're going to get in trouble if you screw something up, they're going to isolate, they're going to go try to fix it, they're going to make it worse, and then when they show up and it gets discovered, they might try to use a scapegoat and say it wasn't my fault or someone else did it. It's just a really bad situation. If you can make an environment or culture where finding screw-ups, raising your hand when something goes wrong, saying I made a mistake is a win, and the person to spot the screw-up the fastest is the biggest winner, then I think you can move forward very quickly. And you can, as W. Edwards Deming said, you can drive out fear, which is one of the most important things you can do in an organization.

Thank you so much for watching. I made this video because Corpus Forte asked me to So if there's a famous entrepreneur that you want me to profile next, leave it in the comments below and I'll see what I can do. I'd also love to know which of Evan Carmichael's top 10 rules hit you the hardest. Leave it in the comments and I'll join the discussion. Thank you so much for watching. Continue to believe, and I'll see you soon.